


The absent burdens

by laughingpineapple



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Blasphemy, Canon Backstory, Exile, First Meetings, Gen, I hope the rest of the cast played some nice basketball, I just didn't want to write them into the scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-23 13:50:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20893139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Of the beliefs and feelings of C. Volfred Sandalwood in the first moments of his exileorIn which it is shown that there is one constant between C. Volfred Sandalwood's old life and the fearsome new possibilities spreading out ahead of him in the wild expanses of the Downside: that being that he can, and unfailingly will, bungle any and all first impressions.





	The absent burdens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [azurefishnets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/gifts).

When Volfred woke up from his long sickness, he was hollowed. The Sclorian river's waters had washed over him, swollen his bark, filled his lungs, dragged him down to a heavy and hopeless sleep as his books burned far above. What had happened to all that water, Volfred did not know. The flood was gone as he slept. His chest dried like a deep river bed, empty and ripe for echoes. There was this one pulsating pain that persisted - as his books burned, the Commonwealth had brought a scorching star-shaped iron to Volfred's face and the memory of its touch still did not leave his bark. The fresh wound burned like a fever and he was forever outcast, traitor, _ reader _, furious, marked, defeated.

Maybe he'd cried out all that water. Hard to tell.

He crawled out of a bed, out of a small wooden room, an empty wagon, stumbling past that strange warm safety into the night outside. The Downside blew a quiet wind in his ears; far away, rows of verdant hills rolled to the starlit horizon. Volfred recoiled, struck by the intensity of the savage wilderness. The trees here cared not for him and his ilk, nor for human, cur nor crone. 

All he was allowed to carry with him in his exile was thoughts and memories: of biographies and commentaries, treaties, monographies, pamphlets and notes and the philosophy hidden under the thick symbols of prophecies. Of colleagues, co-conspirators, chancellors, cohorts; students, ebbing and flowing like the tide, bright, lazy, inquisitive, disillusioned, starstruck, ultimately on their way, past the short aligning of their lives. Pipes, silk handkerchiefs, secret compartments in the bottom drawer of a lacquered desk, the calming smell of pigments. 

As he stood there that night, trembling under the piercing light of the South Star and of an oil lantern kept alight above the wagon's door, Volfred leafed through those thoughts and to those memories as the last remaining relics of the life he had lived. He spread them out on the hills and trees, trying to mold that land into a place C. Volfred Sandalwood could live in, but for all his best attempts, the Downside ate them whole. He could not hope to fill it all, not a sky as vast and fierce as this. So he lost them, his thoughts and his memories, all scattered under mossy rocks and across rivers, and he was empty again. He'd spent years held together by a subversive yearning, filling each day with tactics, ploys and fears, always so many fears - would someone talk? Were his people too harsh, too careless with their proselytizing, would the police be led to his books? Had his eloquence slipped, ever? - and what was left of it now? What knowledge to protect, against which enemies? Distant hillsides did not care. As that tension, too, eventually slipped away from him to disperse amidst the grasslands below, Volfred felt his legs buckle and fell, feverish, to his roots.

"If such is the nature of the Downside, then I acknowledge that the Scribes sent us a lie from their exile, through the Fall of Soliam," he said eventually to the feeble wind of that night, pungent, desperate. "Indeed no belief exists which can survive in this land… no word has permanence here."

That bitter ourburst did not make him feel any better. The sound of his own voice was all the comfort he had left, and even that felt lacking.

It was in that moment that Volfred heard a cracked note and realized that underneath the humming of the wind, a simple, meditative melody had been filling the air. With a strumming of strings, the tune quickly recovered only to wane and come to a reticent halt. Footsteps wandered close to the wagon; eventually, a lone figure came into view. Volfred would have called the stranger a ghost or an apparition, seeing him pale and gaunt, yet possessing an inner shine of sorts, as if he were walking under a different sky and only by accident happened to share his presence with that starry Downside night. His eyes were closed, befitting of a spectre, yet his cloak curved the grass it touched, and much as Volfred was doubting his own dazed senses, the white lute the minstrel carried had made music as real as any other instrument.

"One may see what one wants to see, sir," the minstrel said in a voice that sounded unbearably soft, hiding a buried edge. "In this world and others. In turn, this may influence the truth of a susceptible land."

He hurried past Volfred and into the wagon before the latter had a chance to focus on his words, let alone respond; when he came back out, he was carrying a cup of water and a blanket and offered them both to Volfred, wrapping the blanket around him with brittle care. Having done his part, the minstrel stood outside, silent and very still, staring at the moon.

A fire went out on a ridge to the West. The South Star waned. Under his blanket, close to passing out again but feeling rather too confused and stubborn to give in to exhaustion, Volfred frowned. In his defeat, he was safe and cared for. At the bottom of his burnt hopes and dreams, he was finding, terrifyingly, a kind of freedom: there was a vast, savage wilderness where his fears and rules and schedules had been, free now for him to cultivate anew. Finding his gaze fixed on the minstrel's unearthly figure, Volfred told himself that he would begin again from curiosity, ever the the fertile soil of knowledge. 

"...if I may. You missed a note, earlier," he said in a way that was more of a query, since he regretted not having paid attention to so much of that song and rather missed its calm tune. What had caused him to stop?

"Did I, sir?"

The minstrel did not move. In his composure, he carried within himself the weight of centuries, stories and hopes long gone from the lands above, a moonlit vision from ancient times, with such solemnity as the one that inspired the Scribes themselves atop the sacred mount.

Volfred looked away and reconsidered his words. He would have to learn how to approach this susceptible land again.

(Years later, and at the end of several verbose detours, Volfred took a load off his mind and apologized to Tariq for that early blasphemy. Appreciating the relative humility and eventual goodwill, the will and word incarnate of the Scribes shot him a small, knowing smile. As he'd said on that day, in that place of transformation, what one offered, one got back.)


End file.
